Gunter Damisch. Fields, Worlds (and Beyond)

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Gunter Damisch’s manifold oeuvre, which encompasses paintings, graphic works, drawings, and sculptures, is committed to both the processual and comprehensiveness. What matters to the artist is thinking in pictures, a visual interpretation of the world that does not lay things down but rather aims at creating an awareness of the causality between order and chaos, consolidation and dissolution that determines life on earth.

Gunter Damisch (b. 1958) already made his breakthrough as an artist in the early 1980s when he exhibited in the sphere of “New Wild Painting” as presented by Vienna’s Ariadne Gallery and was one of a group of young artists who strove for a development of figurative painting toward material-based, open pictorial forms. This group, which, next to Damisch, numbered Herbert Brandl, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Otto Zitko, Josef Danner, and Hubert Scheibl among its members, would soon become widely known as the successor generation of the “New Wild Artists.” Damisch also participated in the legendary band project “Molto Brutto,” which was inspired by improvisation and punk music and, in its interdisciplinary approach, has remained a decisive influence on his work until today.

The exhibition forges a bridge from Gunter Damisch’s paintings, graphic works, and drawings of the 1980s to his most recent aluminum casts. Partly grouped to massive blocks, the artist’s individual works from various phases of his production offer a representative view of his artistic universe.